But the organization of labor and the advancement of wages will do more than any other one thing to lend confidence to those who are looking to the South as a field for investment. The Northern capitalist and investor cannot be made to believe that labor as good and efficient as Northern labor will remain unorganized and render its service for one-third or one-half of what the Northern workman receives. Nor does the Southern worker have the same incentive to the high efficiency reached by the Northern workman. One of the most serious mistakes made by many Southern communities in presenting to the Northern investor the advantages at the South is that they put emphasis on the fact that skilled and unskilled labor is “cheap.” Cheap labor that is at the same time efficient is an unknown thing in the North, and Northern men who are familiar with the labor question will not believe that it exists in the South. “If it were as efficient, it would be as well paid,” they say. The proffer of “cheap” labor has done much to retard the industrial development of the Southern states. It is now the universal cry among the employers of the North, particularly among those who oppose organized labor, that they are willing to pay and do pay the highest wages anywhere obtainable and that they are willing to afford and do afford to their employees the most favorable working conditions. The question of child labor is one which must be determined by humane principles, and yet it is a question on which much fanaticism has been expended and much maudlin sentiment indulged. The child develops earlier in the South, where the average boy of fourteen is as mature as the average boy of sixteen in the North. It is a cause for gratification, a fact to the credit of the South, that recent child labor laws have removed from mills and mines and factories a vast army of child laborers who properly belonged in the nursery or at school. It was the South’s shame that they were ever permitted there under conditions once existing, and still existing to a degree.